The workspace includes access to diverse data sources, unique research capabilities for analytics such as domain models, text analytics and natural language processing capabilities derived from Watson, a powerful hardware and software infrastructure, and broad domain expertise including biology, medicine, finance, weather modeling, mathematics, computer science and information technology. This combination reduces time to insight resulting in business impact – cost savings, revenue generation and scientific impact – ahead of the traditional pace of discovery.

The notion of Moore’s Law for Big Data has less to do with how fast data is growing, and more with how many connections one can make with that data, and how fast those connections are growing. While companies could utilize data scientists to analyze their own information, they may miss insights that can only be found by bringing their understanding together with other experts, data sources, and tools to create different context and discover new value in their Big Data.

IBM recently announced a definitive agreement to acquire The Now Factory, a privately held provider of analytics software that helps communications service providers (CSPs) deliver better customer experiences and drive new revenue opportunities. The company is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Financial terms were not disclosed.

This acquisition also complements the IBM MobileFirst Analytics portfolio, which is designed to enhance the way organizations analyze mobile device usage to provide exceptional customer experiences.

Using The Now Factory’s software, CSPs can gain real-time insights into their customers by analyzing massive quantities of network and business data. With this type of insight, CSPs can provide an enhanced quality of service to their customers by better managing negative experiences and network outages.

The demand for this type of software is being driven by the explosion of growth in the volume of real-time data that is being produced by mobile devices and the strain it is putting on mobile networks to collect and process events instantly, monitor their performance, and understand the impact of customer interaction.

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti increased two American doctors' efforts to create a humanitarian, non-profit program named Colleagues In Care in an effort to provide education and training to those who were affected by the earthquake. With support from IBM, Colleagues In Care is utilizing SmartCloud to share medical information with this island, just three hours from the United States. From the gray avenues of New York City to the colorful streets of Port-au-Prince, and all around the world, doctors and technologists are collaborating to save lives.

Watch below for the story of two humanitarians and how their partnership with IBM is helping local Haitian doctors and patients.

IBM recently unveiled new capabilities in its Smarter Cities software, delivering cloud-based analytics to help cities gain powerful insights into how to better serve their citizens.

Cities around the globe are confronted with growing populations, aging infrastructure, reduced budgets, and the challenge of doing more with less. The newest IBM Intelligent Operations software portfolio, based on open cloud computing standards, helps transform city operations to become more efficient. Designed in collaboration with city leaders, the software also applies predictive analytics to help cities budget for capital improvements and improve the efficiency of water utilities.

IBM and Deutsche Telekom recently announced a collaboration to provide the IBM MobileFirst platform in the cloud to small and medium sized (SMB) customers in Europe. Deutsche Telekom’s developer platform - Developer Garden - has launched the new cloud service, Developer Garden powered IBM Worklight, which allows developers to cost-effectively and quickly create apps for all mobile platforms and bring them to market faster than ever before.

As mobile apps proliferate, the cloud has emerged as a key enabler of this growth. Cloud delivery of mobile apps accelerates time to value and speed to market, making availability of new capabilities instantaneous. A recent study from IBM revealed that while only 24 percent of telecom survey respondents currently use cloud for sweeping innovation, in two years more than half (57 percent) of them plan to rely on cloud for business model innovation.

By offering IBM Worklight on the Deutsche Telekom cloud via Developer Garden, SMBs that traditionally may not have the resources to obtain enterprise-grade mobile tools will now be able to easily consume these technologies as a service without long term investment or planning.

IBM recently announced it will invest US$ 17 million in a new data center located in Bogotá. The new center will provide Colombian companies with cloud computing and Big Data services, which will enable organizations to transform their business to meet the growing demands of the local and international markets and to offer flexible, high quality and personalized services for their customers. The new facility expands the US$8 million investment IBM made in Colombia when the company opened a datacenter in 2011.

From the 100 most important Colombian companies defined by the 2012 Colombian Superintendency's* Report, 88% of those companies are IBM clients, which together account for approximately 40% of the country's' industry GDP.

Through the new data center, IBM looks forward to contributing and further strengthening business innovation in the local banking, healthcare, food, insurance and oil & gas industries, among others, allowing them to benefit from a new wave of transformation in services with cloud, Smarter Systems and Big Data capabilities that help drive economic growth, sustainable development and social progress.

IBM recently announced it has acquired Daeja Image Systems Ltd., a leading provider of software that makes it easier for business and IT professionals to view large documents and images. Daeja is a privately held software company with headquarters in Milton Keynes, UK. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As unstructured business data continues to grow exponentially, business users need not only access to information, but a compelling user experience as well. By putting content in the context of how people work every day, professionals can solve problems and make decisions that deliver better outcomes, faster.

Daeja delivers software that helps line of business employees across all industries, especially data intensive ones such as banking, insurance and healthcare, get faster access to critical business information. Users can open and view hundreds of document and image file formats, even if the native application is not present on their devices, which saves time and enables social collaboration and document sharing across the organization.

Social business empowering people, empowering your business. It helps you create exceptional customer experiences, build a smarter workforce, and compete with the world's best. To become a social business today, read IBM POV: http://www.ibm.com/social-business/us...

IBM Launches Digital Marketing Network in the Cloud to Help Companies Improve Marketing Performance in Real-Time

IBM recently joined by more than 100 business partners, launched the IBM Digital Marketing Network in the cloud to help chief marketing officers (CMOs) and their teams more quickly and easily integrate new marketing services to measure and improve their effectiveness in real-time.

IBM Digital Marketing Network provides customized dashboards for e-commerce, mobile, and digital marketers allowing them to view how their marketing campaigns are performing across paid, earned and owned channels.

Part of IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, the IBM Digital Marketing Network can syndicate real-time analytics to any marketing service such as Google Display Network, Doubleclick Search and Badgeville, to help marketers create a more consistent and compelling customer experience based on individual buyer behaviors. Creating a relevant experience is critical; the IBM 2013 State of Marketing Survey cites $83 billion in sales is lost each year due to poor, inconsistent customer experiences.

E.ON and IBM Deliver Innovative Service Offerings to Customers with New Smart Energy Solutions

IBM recently announced that it has been selected by E.ON Metering to operate its Smart Metering IT infrastructure in a private cloud. The new platform will improve the integration of renewable and decentralized energy sources, while also allowing E.ON to deliver personalized services that will put customers in better control of energy usage.

E.ON Metering, a company of E.ON, one of the world's largest investor-owned power and gas companies, will use IBM's Intelligent Energy Service Enablement Platform (IESEP) to improve the deployment and management of smart meters, simplify the integration of renewables, and other innovative services, while at the same time maintaining a high level of customer service.

Under this agreement E.ON will migrate and host the infrastructure in a private cloud using IBM SmartCloud, at one of IBM's Data Centers in Germany. At the same time, the new platform will be upgraded with new analytics and management tools based on IBM Software that will allow E.ON to provide higher-value-added data services for customers. For example, customers will have the ability to view their usage profiles for information about time-of-use-rates and changes in use patterns that can be compared with historical data.

Monitise Teams with IBM To Help Visa Europe Accelerate New Mobile Commerce Services in the Cloud

IBM and Monitise recently announced an agreement that boosts Visa Europe’s ability to provide its member banks with new mobile banking, payment and commerce services in the cloud for its customers. IBM will help Monitise extend and scale the adoption of these services with Visa Europe and develop additional services to bring to the mobile marketplace.

By supporting Monitise solutions with IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, member banks from Visa Europe can accelerate the deployment of a broad range of mobile services on all types of devices. These mobile services enable its customers to more easily manage their money, make transactions and connect with relevant retailers from their mobile device.

Visa predicts that by 2020, more than half of its transactions will be carried out on a mobile device. Today there are 466 million Visa accounts in Europe accounting for one in every 6.75 euros spent daily. With these new enhanced mobile services provided by Monitise and IBM, Visa Europe will enable its 3,000+ member banks across 36 countries to increase their share of these transactions and accelerate the scale of their mobile offerings to meet evolving customer banking needs.

IBM recently announced that it has completed the acquisition of Trusteer, Ltd., a privately held leading provider of software that helps protect organizations against fraud and advanced security threats. On August 15, IBM announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Trusteer. Financial terms were not disclosed.

"The acquisition of Trusteer builds on more than 40 years of IBM’s rich contribution to the security space,” said Brendan Hannigan, General Manager, IBM Security Systems. “Trusteer will extend our data security capabilities further into the cloud, mobile and endpoint security space. This acquisition helps provide our clients with comprehensive network and endpoint anti-malware solutions.”

Also announced on August 15, IBM is forming a cybersecurity software lab in Israel that will bring together more than 200 Trusteer and IBM researchers and developers to focus on mobile and application security, advanced threat protection, malware, counter-fraud, and financial crimes. This lab is an addition to IBM’s existing research and development facilities in Israel.

IBM recently announced that SJ®, Sweden’s largest rail operator, is turning to customer experience management software from IBM to improve its mobile and online booking process and overall online customer experience to increase ticket sales.

IBM's customer experience management (CEM) solutions are helping SJ to understand, identify, and eliminate consumer pain points on online and mobile channels. Visualization and analytics tools designed to help businesses understand and keep pace with the rapidly shifting preferences of today’s increasingly digital consumers are part of IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative to help maximize the value of every single customer visit (web and mobile) and ensuring that more transactions are completed successfully.

Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, SJ transports more than 100,000 passengers every day, with more than 50 percent of passenger bookings completed online. However, during an initial investigation, SJ discovered that more than 230,000 customers annually were experiencing difficulties when booking online travel with a credit card, which ultimately impacted ticket sales.

IBM Placed in Leaders Quadrant by Leading Analyst Firm for IBM MobileFirst

IBM recently announced that Gartner has positioned IBM as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms.[i]

The new report places IBM in the Leaders Quadrant, as measured by completeness of vision and execution ability of IBM Worklight, IBM’s mobile application development platform. Acquired by IBM in February 2012, IBM Worklight is a member of the IBM MobileFirst family of solutions. In just one year, IBM has advanced from the Niche Quadrant to the Leaders Quadrant.

This announcement follows a string of strong showings for IBM MobileFirst services and software capabilities, including IBM Worklight, in Gartner Magic Quadrants this summer. In July, IBM was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing.[ii] IBM is also named a visionary in Magic Quadrants for Managed Mobility Services[iii] and Mobile Device Management[iv].

According to the report, as this market reaches early mainstream status, Gartner expects Leaders to be profitable, and to present lower risk and consistently high project results as the market begins to consolidate and competition grows. Leaders must not only be good at cross-platform development and deployment, but also have a good vision of the multichannel enterprise, support for standards, a solid understanding of IT requirements, and scalable channels and partnerships to market. Leaders must provide platforms that are easy to purchase, program, deploy and upgrade. Leaders can focus primarily on either business-to-consumer or business-to-enterprise, but vision and execution scores are higher for vendors that can cover both use cases today.

Scientists from IBM recently unveiled a breakthrough software ecosystem designed for programming silicon chips that have an architecture inspired by the function, low power, and compact volume of the brain. The technology could enable a new generation of intelligent sensor networks that mimic the brain’s abilities for perception, action, and cognition.